2008/135 Mail Utilities

[James Carlson]

Liane Praza writes:
> 2.1.4. S-Lang Library (dependency of mutt), version 2.1.3
> 
>      http://www.jedsoft.org/slang/
> 
>      S-Lang is a multi-platform programmer's library designed to allow
>      a developer to create robust multi-platform software.

Perhaps a dumb question: does mutt really need s-lang?  It seems to
link against curses just fine, and it doesn't seem to use the
elaborate interpreter and environment that s-lang provides (though I
may have missed something).  If mutt is somehow "better" when linked
against s-lang, ok, I guess that's a fine reason to use it, but
otherwise this seems to be a lot of baggage to drag in for mutt, and a
fairly good risk that we'll have multiple terminal control databases
and thus consistency problems.

>      mutt, fetchmail, procmail, and s-lang are Open Source projects,
>      and their design, development and release schedule are external to
>      SMI.  They make no explicit promises or guarantees of API or ABI
>      compatibility between releases.

They may not make promises, but we can.

Please make at least fetchmail and procmail either Committed or (at
worst) Uncommitted.  They're useless as Volatile, and given that many
of us have relied on these utilities for a decade or more without
seeing any incompatible changes, dubbing them "Volatile" merely
because the author doesn't draw an SMI paycheck seems wrong.

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive        71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757   42.496N   Fax +1 781 442 1677